1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an equipment management apparatus for performing a centralized management of a plurality of equipment, an equipment management system, and an equipment management method. More specifically, the present invention relates to an equipment management apparatus which collects management information from a plurality of equipment, and transmits the collected management information to a centralized management center via communication lines, an equipment management system including the equipment management apparatus and the centralized management apparatus of the centralized management center, and an equipment management method which is carried out by use of these apparatuses.
2. Description of the Related Art
Conventionally, there has been known equipment management system in which centralized management is performed for a plurality of equipment by a centralized management center via communication lines. As such equipment management system, known is a system in which, instead of providing a communication line to each of a plurality of equipment, the plurality of equipment are all together connected to one equipment management apparatus, and the equipment management apparatus is connected to the centralized management center via one communication line. Information about expendables and information about trouble or the like are transmitted from each of equipment to the centralized management center via the equipment management apparatus. Based on the information, the centralized management center performs centralized management for each of equipment.
In the conventional equipment management system such as described above, each information transmitted from each of equipment is managed independently of each other. Therefore, one signal transmission from the equipment management apparatus is performed on information about single equipment. If an increased number of equipment is connected to the equipment management apparatus, the number of signal transmissions from the equipment management apparatus is increased accordingly. In this case, there arises a problem that the processing in the centralized management center is complicated, and increased fee is required for using the communication lines. In addition, there may arise another problem as follows. When a trouble has occurred in one of the plurality of equipment, a service engineer is dispatched to deal with the trouble. In this case, if there arises a necessity of maintenance for another equipment immediately after the dispatch of the service engineer, the service engineer must be dispatched again for the maintenance of another equipment.
In addition, since a plurality of equipment are connected to one equipment management apparatus, there may be a case where, after the equipment management apparatus receives information from each of the plurality of equipment, the timings of transmitting the plural pieces of information from the equipment management apparatus to the centralized management center are overlapped (i.e. become simultaneous). In the conventional management system, it may be impossible to assign higher priority to information with more importance and information with higher urgency over other information, and therefore, may be impossible to transmit such information to the centralized management center prior to other information.